Assimilation of SAR Ice and Open Water Retrievals in Environment and Climate Change Canada Regional Ice-Ocean Prediction System

In this article, we evaluate the impact of assimilating spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data in an Arctic regional ice analysis system over a year cycle. Ice and water information was automatically extracted from more than 7000 RADARSAT-2 HH-HV ScanSAR Wide images acquired over the Canadian Arctic and adjacent waters throughout the entire year 2013. A quality-control procedure was specifically developed and applied to reduce the number of erroneous SAR retrievals. To assess the impact of SAR ice and water retrievals on the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) Regional Ice-Ocean Prediction System (RIOPS) ice concentration analyses, we designed a set of data assimilation experiments with and without the inclusion of SAR retrievals. Our verification results suggest that the assimilation of SAR-derived retrievals considerably improves ice concentration analyses in the situations where high spatial resolution is important (e.g., near land and over small inland lakes). Furthermore, SAR retrievals are particularly useful over the areas where the Canadian Ice Service's (CIS) manually derived ice products (such as Image Analyses, daily and weekly ice charts) are not available or have limited coverage. The three-satellite RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) launched in June 2019 will significantly increase the temporal frequency of SAR data. According to the most recent CIS estimate, more than 54 000 RCM images a year will be acquired over the CIS areas of interest. Therefore, the assimilation of SAR retrievals from RCM should further enhance automated ice concentration analyses products.